


Lost

by Ekatarinabeisel76



Series: Drowning [3]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Boats and Ships, Canon Compliant, Community: 100_prompts, Danny's fear of water, Feels, Gen, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Traumatized Danny, Unresolved Sexual Tension, episode: s03e03 Lana I Ka Moana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ekatarinabeisel76/pseuds/Ekatarinabeisel76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of course they can't just have a normal, relaxing day out on the ocean fishing, because He's Danny Williams and his partner is Steve McGarret, and normalcy is not a word in their vocabulary. And If it wasn't Cathy that Steve hooked up with, who the hell was it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost

**Author's Note:**

> For #019 Lost

The waves gently lapped at the sides of the boat as they drifted further out into the ocean. It rocked them in a soothing rhythm over glittering crests of waves, glinting under the afternoon sun hung high in a cloudless sky. 

With the lullaby atmosphere surrounding them, Danny could almost deal with being afloat miles outside of being able to see land in any direction. Of course, every time he opened his eyes he could see a mass of blue, trapping him in a comparatively tiny vessel drifting through his worst nightmare. At first the idea of fishing with Steve had seemed completely and utterly stupid, but then Kono had gotten in on it, and then Max had started rattling off all the relaxing benefits of deep sea fishing. After three days of constant pressure from his friends, and avoiding Chin as best he could without being a dick about the whole thing, Danny agreed to go fishing.

Steve had suggested the excursion as a means of getting Danny his first Tuna, but the blonde knew it was just a rouse to either get him over his near-debilitating hatred of water, or to address the observably odd change in his behavior with Chin and the conversation they’d had in Danny’s car, or, and this one was Danny’s least favorite theory, both.

And for the record, Danny was still convinced that the entire idea was stupid.

He focused on maintaining a relaxed and amiable disposition; a considerably difficult task considering that Steve, in an ironic twist of fate, would not shut up for love nor money.

“I told you; if we’re going to catch anything we need to troll.” Steve repeated for the umpteenth time.

“No.” Danny insisted. “Trolling is not fishing. That’s you driving around in a boat the same way you do my car.”

 

“Hang on.” Steve interjected, thoroughly exasperated at this point. “I thought the mission was to get you a Tuna?”

“Mission? Why does there always have to be a mission?” Danny demanded, throwing his hands in the air for emphasis.

“The goal is to help you catch an ahi-“

“There’s no goal! There’s no mission. We are just fishing. What that means is we relax, we have a couple of laughs, and maybe we catch a fish, maybe we do not.”

“Well this is called sitting on a boat and not catching anything. Just so you know.” Steve retorted.

“Fine.” Danny replied as he stood up, “That’s why we brought beer. We have a drink, shoot the breeze, pretend we’re friends…”

“Okay, shoot.” Steve said.

“Okay, any news on your Mom?” Danny asked, not sure if that was even a good road to go down for friendly conversation.

“Nothing new. She never left the island though.” Steve answered, and then added, as if saying it one more time in different words would make it more believable and less painful, “She’s still on Oahu.”

“Doing what?”

“Don’t know.” Steve paused to take a sip of his beer. “I’ve got lines out.”

“Is one of those lines Catherine?” The question caught Steve with his bottle halfway to his mouth. The dark-haired man’s movement hitched a little, but the beer made it to his lips anyway before he replied.

“Maybe.”

“That’s good.” Danny said, chuckling somewhat darkly. “Your girlfriend checking up on your mother; that should turn out very well.”

“First of all, she is not my girlfriend, and second, she is not checking up on my mother. She is using her contacts in naval intell to locate my mother. Okay? Nobody is going to know.”

‘Did I say anyone would?’ Danny thought. ‘Did that slip out or did he just read my body language with his freaky super-sailor powers again?’

“Your mother is a spy, and a woman.” Danny argued. “Trust me, she is going to know.”

“Good point.” Steve remarked after a contemplative silence.

“So how did you know that I asked Catherine to look for my Mom?” he asked.

“Oh nothing.” Danny lied. “It was just a guess.” He wasn’t completely lying. It had been a guess, it was just a guess based on Catherine’s frequent trips to Hawaii and her presence at Kamekona’s the other night. Steve didn’t have to know that Danny remembered all of that of course.

“What is it with you and the word ‘girlfriend’? How would you characterize your relationship?” Danny asked mockingly.

“We have a thing.” Steve shot back quickly.

“Yeah, it’s called a relationship, and she is your girlfriend.”

“No she isn’t. It is strictly a sex thing.” He argued.

“Really? Cause it doesn’t seem like a sex thing. Especially since she keeps coming back to see you and you two hooked up after that team dinner thing at Kamekona’s.

“Yeah right.” Steve paled inexplicably before continuing with a slight note of panic. “How do you know that Danny?” he demanded, leveling a severe look at his partner. Danny caved quickly; he was too stressed and anxious to deny someone who could swim far better than him while out in the middle of the ocean. Apparently he had managed to hold out long enough for Steve to perceive that something was wrong though, because the former Navy Seal proceeded to pin him where he sat with a soft glare.

“It’s not going to get better until you talk about it.”

“What? I have no idea what you’re talking about and I have nothing to say about anything.” And then after a pause, “Now shut up and drink your beer.”

“Really? You really expect me to believe that? That minute Chin’s down on the beach contemplating the evils of the universe and the next he’s at the bard drinking with us like nothing’s happened, and all over you on the way to his house, and it has nothing to do with what you two said down at the beach?” Steve fumed. “I’m not buying it Danny. So just tell me what happened.”

Danny clamped his eyes shut in exasperation and turned to glare at his friend.

“Nothing happened at the beach!” he retorted angrily. “I stood there awkwardly and listened to him talk about Malia. And he was not ‘all over me’ – he was trashed and I took him home.” And then, as if it would put the conversation to bed once and for all, the blonde added, “That’s all.”

Steve laughed heartily and leveled jubilant, disbelieving eyes at him.

“That’s all? What, you took him to his house, tucked him in and then left. Nothing else?” Steve demanded teasingly.

“No, nothing else happened.” Danny barked back.

“You’re lying.” Steve declared, and then added, “You hooked up with him didn’t you.”

“No!”

“Oh My God! You Did! You slept with Chin!” Steve was smiling, laughing merrily and about to take a celebratory swig of his beer when he caught Danny’s stony face out of the corner of his eye.

“What’s your problem? What can’t you just let it go?” Danny spat. Steve looked slightly aggravated and genuinely shocked at this reaction. His mouth went slack as he tried to piece together what was bothering Danny.

“Wait, how is this not a good thing? Hell, it’s a great thing! You have a crush on him, he’s obviously into you, so you hooked up; how is that not progress? What’s the issue?”

Danny could feel a vein in his neck pop up and throb violently as he replied.

“The issue, Steven, is that we were both drunk.” He paused, not sure if he really wanted Steve to know what the real problem was. Upon weighing the likelihood of actually getting back on land without telling Steve the whole story, the detective figured he may as well spill it. And the words literally spilled out of his mouth in a rushing cascade, tripping over each other to escape the confines of his mind. “And I fled.”

“You fled?” Steve asked, as if the word was completely foreign to him. “What exactly do you mean by fled?”

“I mean that after we - after we – after-“ Danny pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. “I snuck out when he was asleep.”

Steve closed his eyes, shook his head, and joined Danny in pinching his nose.

“Danno…” he trailed off, having no idea what he wanted to say, or what anyone would say in this sort of situation.

“No! Do not even go there! You hooked up with Catherine afterword, so don’t even try to lecture me-“  
Steve’s face paled once more, and Danny, despite being cut off, quashed a flare of pride at his partner’s reaction. 

“Fine.” He barked finally after a long moment of tense silence. “You should know anyway.” He paused, raising his gaze form his feet to look Danny in the eyes. “It wasn’t Cathy that I hooked up with at Kamekona’s.” Another pause, and Danny felt a sucker punch to the gut made of guilt because Steve looked like he was in real pain now, and he turned his head to face his partner so fast that his neck cracked. “I went home with-“

Before Steve could finish, as if something divine was determined to keep the words from coming out of his mouth, Danny’s reel began to spin violently as fishing-line ran out into the ocean by the meter. The previous conversation was all but forgotten in the mayhem that followed. The two men’s ears were flooded with the sound of the reel spinning and Steve’s frantic orders to reel it in and set the hook.

The fish – and Danny sincerely doubted that the slippery twenty-pound thing he pulled out of the water was a fish – was definitely not worth not knowing who Steve hooked up with the other night. He was his partner, and his best friend. He spent more time with the ex-navy seal than anyone else would dare; he was entitled to have this kind of dirt. Because someone, somewhere, a long time ago decreed that best friends got to know everything and even a mutant tuna fish was not acceptable payment for failure to divulge embarrassing secrets.

The next five minutes flew by in a flurry of pictures and frantic cheers, which were, of course, halted abruptly by someone yelling from far of into the distance. Between the glare coming off the water and distance, Danny could only make out a small grayish dot on the northern horizon.

It took Steve practically no time at all to get the boat started. Within minutes they were right alongside the ‘dingy’, helping a stranger in need into the boat.

Danny took the time to memorize the man’s face after he spotted the blood on his shirt while Steve tried to assess the situation. Steve had Navy Seal skills; Danny had Welsh eyes, a New Jersey Memory, and Italian suspicion. The man was badly sun burnt, and had a thin ring of balding black hair. His face was wrinkled, his hands were callused, his skin was riddled with moles and freckles, and he had a m1119 tucked into his waistband.

Two hours of Steve towing them only got them further into nowhere, and still out of sight of land. Danny could feel his throat getting tight after about fifteen minutes. His chest began to constrict roughly thirty minutes after that. Now, after a hole two hours of being adrift in the ocean on slowly-sinking dingy, he could barely feel his fingers and his feet, his spine felt like a strand of busted up barbed wire against the muscles of back, and he struggled to breath in.

All of the symptoms were somatic of course. He knew that. He’d known that since his parents had made him go sit down with a shrink after Billy died, and that shrink had referred him to a specialist. Before Billy died, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder had been something Danny thought only soldiers got. He wasn’t medicated, not now anyway, but he had a stash of prescription sleep-aids for when the nightmares got bad.

He actually had a pretty good handle on everything until the shark. Of all the things that could have found them, it had to be a shark, a seven-feet-long shark swimming right towards Steve.

Thank god he could still yell. Danny practically screamed at his partner to get back into the boat, over and over and over again as if Steve wouldn’t feel compelled to listen to him if he only said it once.

And of course, all Steve can do upon getting back in the sinking pile of rubber is correct him and mock him for his disrespect towards sharks and anything in the ocean. For a second Danny felt absolutely poisonous anger begin to bubble up inside of him, because how dare Steve find this whole situation funny. It’s his fault that they’re even out there. Danny escaped drowning once by pure luck and it cost him his friend and a lifetime of undisturbed sleep; escaping twice seemed impossible.

But then he calmed down, reminding himself that Steve is his friend and would never let anything happen to him. But then, like an evil parrot, his brain spat back all of the comparisons it could muster up between Billy and Steve and circled it’s ugly prognosis in heavy red ink.

“It’s water Danny.” Steve said calmly, almost pleading in his sheer frustration with his friend. “It’s just water.”

“With tiger sharks and riptides and all kinds of other stuff to make you dead.” Danny supplied. “Not everybody’s a navy seal Steve!”

“Listen, Danny, what is your problem with the ocean?” Steve demanded. “I mean who hates water? Sixty-percent of the human body is water!” He argued.

“That explains why I hate people so much, and right now you are at the top of my list.”

“I’m thinking that tiger shark would be better company right now.” The anger started bubble up again. It yelled things like ‘all alone’ and ‘abandonment’ at Danny’s subconscious until he wanted to scream.

“Then go swim with the damn tiger shark, but do me a favor: if it comes near you punch it! Because I do not want to be the one to tell your sister that you ended up man-sushi!”

“No one is going to be man-sushi!” Steve said, throwing his hands up in frustration. “The ocean is fine. The ocean is safe, as long as you know what you’re doing.”

“I use to love the ocean.” Danny didn’t want the words to come out; once the story started it wouldn’t stop until it was out and in the open and digging it’s claws into his pride and his brain. “We used to spend every single summer in Montauk. This one summer, my best friend Billy Sellaway comes with us.” Danny hit a road block when all he could see was Billy’s face as he appeared the last time he had seen him – cold and dean and soaked on the shore. “One day we deiced to swim out to the buoy and back. I get out there when I get caught in this bad riptide, and then Billy sees me and starts swimming over to me to come and get me out of there.” Another road block – this time Billy hands thrashing wildly up in the air as his head slowly slips beneath the surface of the water. “But then he gets stuck about halfway to me in this undertow. One minute he’s there, and one minute…”

He braves a glance at Steve’s face, and finds an expression so soft and sad that he decides he would rather look out at the water tormenting him than at his friend.

“He’s gone.”

“I’m sorry.” It wasn’t just an apology for what had happened, for what Danny had been through and lived with for every single day afterword. Steve was apologizing for the entire day, for putting Danny in a situation that was so unfathomably terrible for him, and for dismissing his fear of water as some minor phobia that he could reason away.

“We found his body three miles down the coast.” Danny finished, and then added with a glare, “And I have not told that story in a very long time. It took me moving to Hawaii with my daughter to even get back in the ocean again, so that is why…” he gave one last pause as his mind drudged up the image of Billy in his casket, and he finished as if this one phrase summed up everything about him, “I don’t like the water.”

Steve nodded, and then, like a beacon from the divine, Danny caught sight of a strange silhouette looming on the far-off horizon. He asked what it was, but he already knew, and immediately pulled himself to the front of the raft and began to paddle for all he was worth.


End file.
